Hi everyone,

Happy 2015! Hope you are excited for a fruitful new year of Wikipedia :) Here are some updates and requests for volunteers on upcoming projects from the New England Wikimedians:

.We had a productive organizational meeting at Northeastern University in early December. We recapped projects from this past year, looked ahead to 2015, and welcomed a few new members. Read the full meeting notes: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/NEWikiDec14

.With the departure of Kevin Rutherford from our group leadership, Amanda Rust, Molly White, and I will be acting as co-leaders for the time being. Benjamin Lees has been continuing in his role of treasurer. Note that this leadership is fluid, meaning we would welcome others helping out. If you would like to do more for our group, please let one of us know!

.It was decided that we will not host WikiConference USA in 2015, but that we are interested in a) learning more about the possibility of doing so in future years; and b) learning more about how the Wiki Education Foundation might work with us to plan smaller projects this year. More on this TBA...

.Our landing pages are going to be revamped in the coming months. I believe the plan is to revert to using one (and only one) of our Wiki pages as the central repository for info about the group and updates on events. We will continue to use Meetup.com as well, but we likely will not be using the site that Kevin created earlier this year. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts will be updated as well, but they will simply mirror/amplify what is on the main group landing page.

.CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS: Following up on the successful worldwide Art+Feminism edit-a-thons last year, a group at the College of the Holy Cross is hosting an Art+Feminism edit-a-thon on Friday, March 13, a.k.a. Carberry Day ;) Location is the beautiful Holy Cross campus in Worcester, Mass. Lead organizer Rachelle Beaudoin has asked for at least one or two experienced Wikipedians to commit to attending. Please let me know ASAP if you would be willing to help! [Note: Holy Cross is about an hour's drive; there is also a free shuttle to campus from the Worcester commuter rail station.]

.Want to organize an edit-a-thon/event in New England this year? Reply to this message and I will add you to a smaller email chain of folks who are interested in spearheading Wikipedia-related events this year. Ideally, we would like the user group to host at least a few edit-a-thons/photo blitzes/other events in the region in 2015 — subject matter up to you. Who's interested?

.We are planning on bringing back monthly meetings, with some changes: They will likely have some focused topic of discussion before free discussion/schmoozing, and we will probably change up the location from month to month. If you have ideas about this, feel free to send them to Molly, Amanda, or I.

Thanks for reading this far, and hope to see you soon!

cheers,
Maia

maiaw.com | @20tauri | user:Girona7

P.S. If anyone here is an MIT community member, I'm running an IAP workshop Jan 12-15, Writing Women Into Wikipedia, with Kim Surkan, a lecturer in the Women's and Gender Studies program. We will spend a bunch of time on Wiki-editing basics, but if you'd like to participate, please sign up via this info page — note that in-person participation is being capped at 16 ppl. Also, there will be a shorter workshop on the same general topic run by the MIT Libraries on Friday, Jan 23.